"Human life consists in mutual
service. No grief, pain, misfortune or "broken heart" is excuse for
cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all
usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death. It
is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a
slow and horrible one."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (suicide
note)

"There is only one serious
philosophical problem-the problem of suicide."

Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus

"The prevalence of suicide,
without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population
is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension
and that sometimes it snaps."

-Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)

"I take it that no man is
educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide."

-William James

"The power of dying when one
pleases is the best thing that God has given to man admidst all the suffering of
life."

Pliny

"It is the part of
cowardliness, and not of virtue, to seek to squat itself in some hollow lurking
hole, or to hide herself under some massive tomb, thereby to shun the strokes of
fortune."

-Michel De Montaigne (1533-92)

"Nine men in ten are
suicides."

-Ben Franklin (Poor Richard's
Almanac)

"No one ever lacks a good
reason for suicide."

Cesare Pavese

"There may be reason in saying
that a man should want, and not take his own life until God summons him."

Socrates

"The thought of suicide is a
great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad
night."

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

""Then it is sin

To rush into the secret house of
death

Ere death dare come to us?"

-William Shakespeare

Antony and Cleopatra

"Sometimes I wonder if
suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life."

Vaclav Havel

"If you must commit
suicide....always contrive to do it as decorously as possible; the
decencies, whether of life or of death, should never be lost sight of"
."

George Borrow (1803-81)

"We cannot tear out a single
page from our life, but we can throw the whole book into the fire."

-George Sand

"To practically everyone at
some time in his life comes the thought of suicide in greater or lesser
degrees."

Dr. Thomas W. Salimon

"If I commit suicide, it will
not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be
for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my
being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I
reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the
shape of my will."

-Antonin Artaud

"Each of us kills himself in
his own fashion. Slowly or quickly-he does it. The reasons are many, and some
are beyond explanation. Nevertheless, if you understand the implications of this
truth, you will enhance your chances of delaying or obstructing your own
destructive processes."

Peter J. Stein Crohm M.D.

How to stop killing Yourself

"Although homicides tend
to garner the headlines, a different and perhaps more disturbing form of violent
death is on the rise around the world: suicide. Since the mid-1950s, global
suicide rates have jumped by 60%. This year, the World Health Organization (WHO)
estimates 1 million people will die by their own hand.

Analysts are generally loathe to
attribute rising suicides to any single cause. However, researchers have
uncovered a seemingly counterintuitive trend: As a nations’ living standards
increase, its suicide rate tends to rise as well. A 1984 study of 43 countries
worldwide found that rising quality of life-measured by such factors as
education, health, women’s status, and economic and political stability-is
associated with declining homicide rates, but increasing suicide rates.

Social scientists hypothesize that
people who experience deteriorating living standards may attribute their
suffering to external factors and thus are more prone to take out their
frustrations on others. This view is consistent with studies linking increases
in income inequality with higher homicide rates. But when individuals experience
steady improvement in the quality of their lives, they may blame continued
unhappiness-whatever its true causes-on themselves.

Living in a more Violent World….Foreign Policy

"My work is done. Why wait?"

George Eastman….suicide note….

"The theme of these pages is born of a double astonishment: that the
notion of a Christ who would commit suicide should have been born so early, as
early in fact as the Gospel of John; and that this notion should owe virtually
nothing to the anti-Christian polemic of the first centuries. The idea of the
suicide of Christ will have been, before all else, a Christian if not indeed a
Christological idea."

Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat

Le Suicide du Christ

"In 1610, Donne wrote Pseudo-Martyr, a dismissal of the
dissident Catholic martyrs of the early seventeenth century as deluded
suicides. Then, just a year later, he wrote Biathanatos, a defense of
outright suicide in which Jesus himself is chief among the exemplary suicides
of the past. Biathanatos-so daring in its day that it could be
published only after Donne's death-is a tour de force of authentic
intellectual passion. A fiercely brilliant scholar who once confessed a "sickely
inclination" to become a biathanatos,(that is, a suicide: the
Greek word means "one dead by violence, especially self-inflicted"),
Donne was paradoxically strengthened by his pathology to trace Christian
martyrdom to its source in the suicide of God Incarnate. Pseudo-Martyr,
by contrast, seems a politically expedient work of conventional religious
propaganda. yet who is to say that Donne did not believe what he wrote both
times?"

Jack Miles

Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God

"So why do almost all cultures condemn suicide as a general and/or
religious principle? People better qualified than me have tried to answer
that. From a cursory glance at various cultures it is obvious that suicide is
a threat to society, as well as an indication of both personal and societal
weaknesses. "My God, people don't do such things," Hedda Gabler's
husband Tesman says on discovering his wife's body. In a sense we are all
Tesmans, making our world sane by making it familiar and orderly, and ignoring
those aspects of it that disrupt that order. Suicide disrupts our world far
more than simple death, because death is inevitable and suicide is not. It is
a clear indication that something is wrong with an individual, and therefore
possibly with us all. Recall that hole in the fabric of society that needs to
be repaired after any death, to prove that life goes on. It is doubly hard to
fill after a suicide. The very nature of the death implies the fabric may be
rotten and not worth repairing."

Greg Palmer

Death: The Trip Of A Lifetime

"Suicide unfortunately is an act of supreme egotism
whether it be viewed psychologically-the most "brutal way of making sure
that you will not readily be forgotten"-or theologically-the usurpation
of divine authority. Consequently the quickest way to defrock martyrs and
deprive them of their laurels has been to accuse them of "tragic
show," as the emperor Marcus Aurelius did of the early Christians, or of
"Suicide while of Unsound Mid," as did the fourth knight of Thomas
Becket in Eliot's Murder In the Cathedral. The only really effective
rebuttal to such an attack is the one directed at Thomas Thackham in 1557
which accused him of bias and self-interest. Thackham had dismissed Julius
Palmer's death at the stake as self-murder, and Palmer's defender wrote,
"(I) sayeth that he died a martyr unto the Lord; you say in effect that
he ended his life as a castaway and willful destroyer of himself. To be short,
the story justifieth the martyrdom, You, to justify yourself, deface the
martyr."

Lacey Baldwin Smith

Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom In the Western World

*************************************

Book: "A Full Inquiry Into the Subject of Suicide: To which are added
two treatises on dueling and Gaming" by Charles Moore

Book: "History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture" by
Georges Minois